Cipher, The

Nicholas is a directionless would-be poet working a video-store job when Nakota, his volatile on-and-off lover, drags him to see something she's found: a bottomless black hole in the storage room down the hall. She dubs it the Funhole and starts feeding it things to see what happens, an insect jar that fuses into something new, a mouse that comes back wrong, a severed hand that twitches back to life. But it is Nicholas, not Nakota, whose body the hole marks, a weeping wound blooming in his palm that will not heal. Kathe Koja's Bram Stoker Award-winning debut is a claustrophobic descent into body horror and cosmic dread, tracking obsession, jealousy, and physical corruption as the Funhole pulls everyone near it apart.